Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In many situations, learners have the opportunity to observe other agents solving problems similar to their own. While not as favorable as learning from fully explained solutions, this has advantages over solving problems in isolation. In this paper we describe the general situation of learning from indifferent agents and outline a preliminary theory of how it may afford improved performance. Because one of our long-term goals is to improve educational methods, we identify a domain that allows us to observe humans learning from indifferent agents, and we summarize verbal protocol evidence indicating when and how humans learn.